Take heart. I see your heart. With all my heart, too. We say ‘heart’ but what we mean is our soul. For I have seen a heart, open chest, electrical dependence of each thumping beat, a glorified muscular pump, a necessary vessel: empty of all wonder. The heart we infer, the tragic little heart we call our soul, we cannot see. We can feel it, sense it, and witness the cause and effects of a good soul and a bad soul. What is that? A good soul and a bad soul. Or is there only a soul and the truth and untruth of it’s masters actions?
The soul and identity intertwined and woven in the hands of God, timeless and yet eternal. Either light shines upon the soul or darkness sets. A choice. Not a consequence nor a predetermined state. That delicate heart we call our soul, still receiving and pumping, but it’s contents are neither blood nor gas. Filled with love and responsibility, or emptied by hurt and failed intentions. A soul is a receptacle that can only gives in excess of what it receives. Divine input fills unconditionally. Human input often poisons. Yet we give it away, to him, and her, and them, and everyone in between: what’s left at the end of our earthly run?
This tragic little heart, a new shiny car we must drive eighty years. Maintenance and washes, bumps and crashes. Our most vital organ. Our most delicate possession. No person can stare into that soul. No earthly medicine can mend it’s broken state. It pains us more than skin and flesh, and yet longs for something more. Your soul is who you are, a reflection of a piece of the divine creator. But we see it through the fog and smoke of burnt lies and untruths. This bleeding heart of mine, longs to be restored. To be filled by God and overflow. Just to bleed once more.
I walked along the beach, some hour past midnight. The moon was low and red, the tide pulled high, the ocean vast. Where the water would end and the sky began was somewhere on the spectrum of imagination. Did I wander onto this place in company? No, I am certain I came here alone. My lonely footprints trailed behind the shifting sand. “Two footprints there beside my own, always within reach…”; the child’s prayer whispered at bedtimes everywhere came to mind. No, only one set of footprints chased my weary self. Though creations beauty mocked my brokenness, I did not feel his presence there. So, I went searching in the darkness.
Eventually, my feet came to meet the waters edge. It’s slow push and pull, rise and fall, the sand rushing from beneath my ten toes. I felt the salted plea to walk into the sea. The hidden urge to swim toward the non-existent horizon until I could go no more. Then, diving down on single breath, deeper, deeper, deeper still, until the weight of the water pulled me home. A sudden deep breath reminded me I was still standing there at the waters edge. The moon was stunning before me, the stars were bright above me, but upwards the beach was black and void. So, I went searching in the darkness.
My mind would wander here and there in violent sudden jerks of memories past and hopes future. My heart would swell in pain and mourn, each breath a seconds desperate relief. I talked a lot. To God and you. I suppose that is why I felt such company. My thoughts so deep I disappeared into the matching darkness ahead on the beach: a vapor. A dangerous place to be, to become my thoughts, my memories. Each step a falling leg of unconscious direction, I was just another empty shell upon that beach. Until the piercing pain of something sharp drew me from my stupor, I did finally stop. Uncertain of how I came this far, into darkness, along some quiet shore, I stood and stared.
I looked up into the void ahead and watched: a dark blot, a soft something, an orb of black. Growing closer, getting bigger, moving. Perhaps, some other person roamed this beach some hours past midnight, too. Closer still in eery quiet, bigger even with every moment. Then it stopped. I stepped closer, searching in the darkness. He stood there, a dark black stallion, tall in confident strength, his mares behind him shifting in the sand. A warning breath from flared nostrils as I stared. God was here. No footprints in the sand, but his fingerprints everywhere around me. I wanted to share it with you. This moment. This experience. But it belonged to me.
As suddenly as they came they raced towards me. My heart raced, too, but I was not afraid. I longed for death. Then, when almost in reach, they turned away and ran back up the shore. Once again transformed into their dark black orbs, growing smaller, darker still, until nothing. The darkness called me no longer. I looked up in that moment into the sky, hoping to see God or you. The stars were too many, bright and scattered, like spilled diamonds across a black felt cloth. They were beautiful and I was small. Insignificant to the stars, yet somehow still significant to the same Creator. I wondered if looking back the stars saw me shining in the same way I saw them. Are we stars to some cosmic eye? Shining bright, sharing light, burning hot, scattered about in service of the universe? So, I went searching in the darkness. Until light found me there.
My, how I have run to escape her, this thing called Fear, for nearly all of my life. I was introduced to her as a child: the blunt force, cold isolation, rancid stench of it’s presence in the room, as if it had only recently roomed with death before turning me to its prey. A devilish beast known to play with it’s food, leaving the hunted paralyzed and shaken but still alive. Fear. Fear of fear. The cycle that infects a lifetime of otherwise divine potential.
The more I hid from all of my fears the more creative she became. She’d strike and pierce my side or my heart, inflict my thoughts and my dreams; and though her presence was known, I could not see her though I tried. I saw instead anger, depression, rage, anxiety, abandonment, embarrassment, even laughter on the strangest of occasions. I saw desperation to protect myself, guard my heart, run, fight, hide. But it was her, I am sure. Fear, masked in my outburst, demanding I take control of everything or my fate would be the grave. Or worse, loneliness.
While she distracts you from awareness and leads you to your darkest emotions, how quickly she will work upon your heart and mind. Silencing God. Convincing you of great personal afflictions. Replacing your self image. Holding you back and tying you down. Fear is the great illusionist. An instinct for survival that secretly desires to be so much more. An irony that survival can be worse than death when consumed by her spirit. Fear needs to be fed and her appetite is endless. The pain of loss of flesh leads to coping and coping is our greatest temptations of false comfort when it is fear that has instructed us all these years.
Fear wears a thousand masks. Yet all of fear dies a thousand deaths when illuminated by truth. Love can never, ever, be received in a state of fear. That is why God did not create us in a spirit of fear, but one of strength, and power, and self-discipline. God hears us and he knows our fears. But we cannot hear him when we are consumed by it. Every prayer must start with an honest confession of our fears, a request to see ourselves as God sees us in that moment: fear will run and hide from the light shown in the truth. And the truth is that God makes each of us in his image. So that when we are weak, his strength is made perfect. He calls me Bold. And I rarely feel so, but when I need it most he says it out loud. You are bold. Because in your weakness you embraced me, you were brave, and you will have my strength.
“This is my command- be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9
If I were death I wouldn’t roam. Never hidden false in masks of foes. If I were death and death were me, a friendly smile is all you’d see. The whispers cast on weary ears. I’d feast as friend on all your fears. Neither faith nor hope, your prayers, your truth, could distract me from my liars booth. For if death were me and I were death, you would not know if I came or left.
If any quiet hope in you remained, I would not fight you, I’d never strain. Every hurt that scarred your heart, is a path my lies would pick apart. If I were death and death were me, I’d aim my words so carefully. I’d stir your pain with lover’s touch. Convince so well you are you’re only crutch. For if death were me and I were death, you’d never feel me around your neck.
Since I’m not death and death’s not me, I’ll find my truth at Calvary. What I know death cannot see, before death came He set me free.
There was rumor once, of a place in me that grew, the most beautiful of lush green gardens. Rich was the soil, dark and moist, from which sprung life: foliage of all the colors bright and plain. Rumors told, too, that God wandered there; His own Son even prayed, knees upon that very soil, moist then from the sweat of his brow, from which sprouted more life so pure. Trees reaching, stretching their outermost fingertips to the skies in worship. Every ray of sun bleeding through to the pathways of unworn grass, untouched by weed or pest. There was rumor that garden, beautiful and green, was painted on my soul. What’s more, the rumors were true, whispered among the angels who watched me grow, that the garden was me, every tangled limb and reaching leaf the pieces of my being. My heartbeat vibrating softly through the vines and across the forrest floor. Living. Breathing. Known.
Did you hear the rumor then? That the trees did scream, too. Their pain was heard not by man or dog, but by ears eternal. The garden grew, but was not maintained. Weeds were gathered and planted about. Their thorns and vines striking through the soil, seeping up it’s moisture, strangling every flower that bloomed. Suffocating new life. The trees looked on in terror. Protectors of this forest floor, shade to the garden that was my soul. Rumor has it, it started with a spark. Not divine, but intended for evil. That spark grew, and drew upon itself every ounce of air til flames erupting, jumped about. That fire burned, hot and high, devouring every ounce of deadwood that fell, consuming vine and weed, branch and limb. Rumors spread, that the pain was savage, that even the trees did scream, too. Until after rain, and setting sun, and morning new: remained the life, once smothered by every weed and rotting log peaking through.
There is a rumor now, that God recognizes every plant that remains upon this garden floor. His watchful eye and strong right hand moving burned deadwood away. It is no rumor, that garden grows beautiful again today.
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. –Ranier Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing
When I began my grief, all I wanted were answers to the why’s. Why did I make any mistakes? Why wouldn’t she listen to me? Why wouldn’t she want to work through this and save what we vowed to uphold, for better or worse? Why this pain? Why is God silent? Why can I not seem to move forward? WHY? As my grief evolved, so did my relationship with God. I still don’t know the answers to any of those questions. But I have so many other answers he found necessary to reinstate my identity and to see myself as the man that I am. I carry great pain, loss, and sadness. And I struggle with shame that gets in the way of progress at times. But those are the forming scars; proof that it was real. And God’s voice is proof that he is real.
If there is one area I did not fail myself, it was that I directed all of my anger and passion onto Him. I ignored my conditioning to believe that I could only come to him in reverence and I swung everything I had to challenge his realness. It turns out, what I was challenging was myself and he was there to answer. Whether I was cursing him or praising him, he was there. My questions evolved, and so did his answers. There was no silver bullet and no silver lining. Only a God willing to share in the suffering and pull me to safety.
The day my life fell apart I sat prepared in a bed of suicide. I cursed God saying, how many people have called out to you for help before they pulled the trigger, and you were silent? Suddenly, a startling knock on the door. Dogs barking. Who saved me then? I continued to spiral in pain. Calling out loud for help while simultaneously accusing him of absent fatherhood. A form of bargaining and manipulation aimed at forcing him into instant repair of the life I once had. But the chaos that was surrounding me was because the life I once had wasn’t the life he wanted for me.
Do not misconstrue my words- it wasn’t God’s plan to upend my life. He didn’t want my person to turn their back on me and walk away. He didn’t want a covenant to be ruined. No more than he wanted me to make my own poor choices. He had chains to break in me that could be freed no other way. He doesn’t make your partners choices for them, just like he doesn’t make yours- he is there to heal your marriage but not force someone else to participate. And ultimately, he is there to heal you even when you lose everything you love or hoped for. Sometimes, in my screaming and crying and constant questioning, the only thing I would hear from him was, “keep showing up”. I didn’t know what I was doing. Still don’t, really. But if you keep showing up, you’ll find he is always there waiting. Not in silence. Not observing you and teaching you a lesson through his absence. He is there. Present and already at work.
God wanted me to see myself how he saw me. To start with self honesty. To know I am a good husband, a good father, a good son, a good brother, and an amazing human being. It’s hard to say those things. But it was easy for him to tell me- over and over again.
“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” ― C.S. Lewis
The ashes of my terminal end seemed to fall about me for months. My panic persisted in abundance as I frantically thrashed about emotionally, desperate not to feel this remarkable pain of loss. Begging and bargaining out loud to nobody, waiting, screaming in an empty house, breaking into sudden fits of sobbing. I watched as she erased me from her life with out a word spoken to me. I thought of what helped in the past to cope with pain. Drugs? Never again, they only made my life worse the first time. Alcohol? I was too fearful I would take my own life if inhibited. Exercise? I couldn’t move. Frozen on the couch in a constant state of terror. Memories everywhere. Thoughts of her moving on to break her own promises too soon. I searched through a dating site and panicked in 36 hours, shutting it down- I couldn’t even imagine touching another person. I googled vacations and places to travel. Why travel with no person to make memories with, especially without the person you traveled with so much before the fall? Okay, all else failed perhaps a new hobby? Fear had become my new hobby. No light could shine onto any new possibility. To be honest, very little light still shines through the cracks of this prison wall. I found that all I could do is ask, why? Why God? WHY?
Driven by fear and pain, “why” is the first question on the lips of every suffering child. It necessitates a satisfactory answer. It mandates a response that is fulfilling. I only want to hear one thing- I’ll fix this. My entire being is so consumed by the flames of fear that any response to my cosmic questioning, except all that I lost will be reinstated, will not suffice. “Why did this happen”, falls from my mouth and lungs so many times that it eventually evolves unnoticed to “why aren’t you answering me”? My mind is so chaotic all I can hear is the constant drone of unwanted memories and the sound of my heart breaking into more pieces. My body and mind buzzing with a million thoughts, regrets, alone beneath a blanket of shame. I ask for forgiveness but cannot even come close to forgiving myself. Hanging myself on that cross without the respect of a burial and certain of no resurrection. I believe God exists. I believe he can put me back together, speak miracles into existence, calm my storm. But I only want one thing from him. So, what I perceive is silence.
When I found him in the garden, he was praying quietly, but he was speaking to me still: calling to me. Not giving me an answer. Not taking away my pain. Just inviting me to sit and share in his own experience of grief, even to the point of death. I had to wander in on him, there in that garden, several times. It took multiple invitations. Eventually, I sat there long enough to hear him speak again. “Now come with me to the cross”. Fear again took over because the cross demands my confessions. But this is what I asked him for: to hear him speak. Even then he did not answer my why. He wouldn’t because I already knew. I know why I am here. Instead I finally asked him what- what should I do? What do you want? What can I learn? What am I? What do YOU WANT ME TO UNDERSTAND? And then, the slightest movement. The next vision. The next image. Coming in more clearly every time. Speaking to me. First he demanded honesty. He demanded me to speak the truth in my confession. Then he walked toward the cross and I hoped to follow. That was my first real experience knowing for certain that I heard the voice of God. No voice at all- but I heard it still. What now? Well, I don’t know. But I do know, at least, He is real. And He speaks to me.
“Why” still wanders into my heart every few minutes, it seems. It still sucks the air out of the room and pierces my chest with sudden pain. I try to redirect my question to “what”. Knowing that “why” will trap me and “what” will eventually free me. Hoping. Wanting. Wishing. What do you want me to understand, Lord?
God still speaks to us. Why is God silent when we need him most? He isn’t standing by. He isn’t teaching us something through silence. He isn’t sadistic. The answer is chaos. There is so much chaos. So much pain and loss that terror fills every part of us so that all we can hear is the echos of our screams. For the same reason we are unable to see someone’s love and commitment to us when it is right in front of us and we make choices that contradict our true identity- we don’t see that we are standing in our own way while God speaks. He speaks: through feelings, emotions, thoughts, dreams, words, visions… But if I am so surrounded and filled with FEAR, I cannot hear the voice in the storm. Fear of losing what we had forever. Fear that we already know it will never return to “normal”. Fear that what God will say we do not want to hear. Because only one thing, one single response, would do. And that is what we want most and most what we cannot have. And fear is so damn loud.
My vision comes to me in low resolution, like an old television, bunny ear antennae straining in different directions to pull in bits and pieces of the image across the screen. Christ kneeling in a garden. It’s dark. It’s dark all around in the trees that surround him with a single torch burning in a small clearing. He doesn’t look at me. I cannot see his face. I see his clothes. His robe- brown and white, his low resolution bare feet behind him but I cannot make out his toes. Odd that I look every time. I hear him praying quietly, desperately, and with fervor. He is sweating and it drips to the ground. I hear him praying. And I hear him say “come sit with me”. He doesn’t pause his prayer, he doesn’t turn to say anything to me, but I hear him.
This is where my journey with him often ends. He doesn’t speak any further wisdom to me. I have nothing profound to walk away with. Nothing to change my life back to whole. Only an invitation to kneel by him and suffer beside him. To witness the pain on his face as he prepares to lose everything he has known in life. His friends, his family, his hopes, his dreams, his comforts. Only an invitation to hear his desperate whispers. To be still. And to know.
Most often I find myself praying to forget. Despite them being my fondest memories in life, they are what cause me the most pain. Those treasured moments burn like hot coals in the morning and keep me from sleep. If only I could focus on the troubled times, the hard parts, the things that didn’t bring joy. If only the worse times with her weren’t better than the best times anywhere else. I would gladly have the operation to remove every memory from those years. To go on with a hole in my memory where all my hopes and dreams once lived. Unnoticed. Unaware.
Grief is a sign that you loved deeply. And the deeper the grief the greater you loved. The greater you loved the more painful this unnecessary torture of life’s experience will be. There is no way around it but to feel it. And there is nothing good about what you will feel. It is too big to bottle up and hide in the corner. It is to grande, too much, to deal with in quiet rooms alone. It is evidence you are capable of huge love. And therefore, at risk for greatest loss. When love is in front of you the risk is worth every bit. When it disappears, and you feel the pain of generational loss, the gamble seems unfair.
I grieve because my heart was honest about my love for a person.
“Bargaining. What could I exchange for you? The silence after storms? My typing fingers?” Linda Pastan, The Five Stages of Grief
The hardest part of mourning my deepest loss, besides the loss of the person themself, is the compulsory crying out to God and quiet waiting for my life to come back together, only to wake up in the morning still crying and broken. Begging for repair, hoping to the point of actual belief it would happen, watching it grow further and further away.
Bargaining is a stage, or part, of grief that feels more reflexive than any other desperate emotion during the process- it flows out of us as an offering or a sacrifice in a plea for deliverance. It is that one piece of the grieving process that is most woven into every single other stage we may progress through, and what, I believe, keeps us the furthest away from acceptance. For what should I concern myself with the embrace of my new reality when I have the hope of a lifeline? Instead, we often find ourselves graveling at the foot of the person we lost, our God or higher power, or both.
“Bargaining is a defense against the feelings of helplessness experienced after a loss. It happens when people struggle to accept the reality of the loss and the limits of their control over the situation.” Sabrina Romanoff, PSYD
The hopelessness of bargaining is like pissing into the wind and calling it rain. The problem with bargaining is that the alternative is to accept every single hope and dream that just died an unjust death and changed every inch of your reality will never be known again. To those of us who grieve, that would be a most certain death sentence. So, we tell ourselves we will change, we do change ourselves, we continue to do the little things around the house that our loved ones used to appreciate, we beg those around us, we offer deals to our accusers, and we offer God anything he so chooses and a lifetime of service if he will just do this one miracle. I went so far as to offer God my life for just one more year. Nothing. Then it was one more day. Still nothing. Then it was my life for the pain I was left with- obviously, nothing. Until there is nothing else, acceptance remains a step away.
Our friends and our family encourage us to trust in God’s promises, and rightfully so; they love us and have the same desire for hope and recovery that we do. We are certain those promises must equate to his willingness to give us back what we lost. And there, again, lies the difference between reality and expectations: disappointment. But this disappointment is a loss of what little hope we are able to conjure, a cosmic let down of cosmic scale. Even in this cycle of hope and hope lost, over and over again, I’d rather to have hoped in those moments to something greater than myself than to have lost it all without a fight. The underlying hope that will remain, that must go unseen amidst our pain, is the hope that bargaining leads to self-reflection, change, and a relationship with God. Each time, a little better than the days before. We can hope.
Can God perform a miracle and put what you lost back together? I don’t know. If your grieving death, no. How is a cold heart any different than the dead? A person’s free will is a death to God as a beatless heart is to a person. Can God give you the strength to carry on? I think so. I hope so. In these times, you know the weakness and inabilities of being human more acutely than any other person at any other stage in their life. And for some reason, in these times, we crave God’s strength. And we carry on. We hope there is something to that.
Bargain with hope. But remember we have nothing much to give in this bartering than what we have left inside of us. And eventually, our sight of the scope of the damage around us needs to become bigger and bigger in every effort to accept that nothing taken away will be given back the same. Hope as we know it now may not be the hope as we know it when it is all said and done.
“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is evidence of things we cannot see.” Hebrews 11:1
